PhD Proseminar I

Term:
Fall 2010

Subject Code:
GANT

Course Number:
7005

The purpose of this graduate seminar is to orient masters and doctoral students to the pragmatic, conceptual, and epistemological details of fieldwork and the reporting and narration of ethnographic work as it presents itself in the immediacy of everyday human experience. We will explore a broad range of issues from the practicalities of fieldwork to the epistemology of research, from modes of analysis with various forms of data to ethical issues in research and trends in reporting and narrating ethnographic work. The goal of this seminar is to help students prepare for extended ethnographic fieldwork. Apart from familiarity with both technical 'how-to' literature and ongoing debates about the nature of ethnography, each student will design and implement a small fieldwork project based on observation and interviewing, which will be the basis of an analytical case study.